Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo was born 28th May 1959 in Eltham, a district in southeast London, to an English mother and a Nigerian father. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a welder who became the first black councillor for Greenwich, where he represented the Labour Party. Evaristo attended Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls; she went on to study Community Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and later received a doctorate in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has received both an MBE and an OBE for services to literature.

As of 2025, Evaristo has published 10 novels as well as numerous plays, essays, and works of short fiction. Many of her works have won or been nominated for awards, with the most prestigious being the Booker Prize, which Evaristo won in 2019 for her novel Girl, Woman, Other. She was awarded the prize jointly with Margaret Atwood (for The Testaments) and became the first black woman to win a Booker Prize. There was much discussion and criticism at the time over Evaristo being awarded the prize jointly and whether this diminished from her achievement by forcing her to share the prize with a white woman. Evaristo herself expressed delight at sharing the stage with Atwood.

From her first publication, a poetry collection called Island of Abraham, Evaristo has been tackling provocative and complex subjects. Her works often focus on ideas around identity, particularly black British identity, and the culture that surrounds it, as well as womanhood and the struggles and triumphs that come with it. As she described it in an interview with The Guardian about Girl, Woman, Other, ‘I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature.’ (Sethi, 2019) Her works also explore themes and ideas around non-traditional and queer relationships; Evaristo has a clear focus on othered, ignored, or silenced voices.

Throughout her life, Evaristo has also focused on real-life voices and providing opportunities for them to speak and create art, having founded and chaired theatre groups, literary prizes, and editorial and curatorial works. In the 1980s, she established the Theatre of Black Women with two other women (Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire), which was dedicated to producing plays that were written by, written about, and starred black women. In 2012, she initiated the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, which was funded by Brunel University and ran from 2012–2022. The prize aimed to promote, celebrate, and help the development of poetry from Africa.

In 2022, Evaristo published her memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, which has received high praise and critical acclaim.

Photo credit: Bernardine Evaristo by Annette Brook (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)